At Voices for Racial Justice we have experienced three major evolutions of our longstanding community organizing training. In 1993 we started as the Organizing Apprenticeship Project (OAP) responding to the need for locally based community organizing training in our state, given that many of our community members felt they had to travel nationally to grow their skills as organizers. Organizers worked with mentors throughout the training in an apprenticeship model. Overtime, the OAP model was successful at growing our local networks of grassroots organizers until training cohorts were made up of mostly people of color and Indigenous people. Despite the success, it was not enough. Our organizers of color were hitting walls naming the limitations of diversity and inclusion, and a need for real racial justice oriented movement work in the field of organizing.

In 2006, we began to shift our training modules towards racial justice, and in 2014 we became racial justice centered from the inside out by centering leadership of color on our board and staff. We renamed our organization to Voices for Racial Justice and made an intentional commitment to getting organizing tools into the hands of Indigenous folks and folks of color. Despite the intentional centering of racial justice internally and externally, we started to notice how much mainstream or common organizing approaches and strategies even amongst our communities of color were steeped in and influenced by a culture of colonization and Whiteness.

In an exchange with organizers in Hawaii, our partners in Kalihi Valley raised the question of how militaristic common organizing approaches and language are, for example “base build, target, opponent, comrade, ally, frontlines, agitate” and so on. Our partners shared with us ways of organizing within Indigenous communities in Hawaii before U.S Occupation, such as the role of women’s work in peacekeeping as essential. We know our ancestors have resisted in many ways, some of us come from both warrior traditions and peacekeeping traditions and many more. At home in Minnesota, our organizers named both the pressure and pain of assimilation and burn out in the field of organizing, and as a remedy need to honor the various traditions we come from. In response, we began to reject the professionalization of organizing as a “field” in itself and began to embrace a village model of organizing, that many members of our community are a part of, where resistance is a way of life informed by many differing ancestral traditions and life experiences.

There is no one way to organize, and there is not one model organizer, but many ways, many peoples, many traditions and histories. This led to our third major combustion, and strategic shift integrating cultural strategy and healing justice throughout all of our work and training. Organizing, power, and healing, look and mean different things to our communities that are multicultural, multilingual and intergenerational. We do not assume one model fits all. We have now been building our organizing training from the ground up, in partnership with elders, youth, artists, incarcerated loved ones, parents, immigrant communities and so on.

WHY SHARED LEARNING?

We believe we are all experts in our own experiences, and there is no one expert as we shift to a collectively influenced training toolkit inspired by many folks of color and Indigenous folks across our state. We have found creating spaces for shared learning has been key in our work for racial justice and the development of our upcoming toolkit. At Voices, shared learning looks like breaking hierarchies, collectively defining what things mean to us, and sharing the wisdom in the room. It is interactive, hands on and reflective. It is practicing what we are learning from one another.

In our office we have a physical wall that has been converted to a movement garden. We’ve invited members of our community to add their contributions in response to what prompted our new strategic vision. Our partner and fellow community artist Ricardo Levins Morales says “The soil is more important than the seeds. Almost anything will grow in rich, nutritious soil, whereas it’s hard to get anything to grow if the soil is barren and toxic and won’t hold moisture. So the seeds are our projects, our initiatives, our institutions, that we want to build and the soil is the compost of beliefs, ideas, values, narratives that create the environment within which we are working.”

At Voices we are centering our work around tending to the soil, meaning tending to the beliefs, values, narratives and ideas that make up the culture we are in. Part of how colonization works is when one group, culture, or way of being must dominate over others. Our remedy to colonization is biodiversity, to value the diversity in knowledge, culture, language, worldviews, medicines, plants and perspectives. This is not just metaphoric. In Minnesota we have massive mono-cropping where one crop is reproduced on a mass scale to the detriment of the soil, loss of Indigenous crops and cultures. The conditions of our physical soil often reflects the toxicity of dominant worldviews, values and beliefs. And we can replicate this toxicity amongst ourselves, by policing each other due to our differences rather than honoring how that makes us stronger. As we tend to our soil, we must also tend to our worldviews, values, and narratives that make up the culture that we live in.

MAKING CULTURE SHIFT

Tending to the soil is an invitation to take responsibility for the culture we live in and create. It is an invitation to shift practices that are not in alignment with a healthy ecosystem. Culture exists on many levels: personal, interpersonal, familial, collective, and institutional. There is culture we create, inherit and reject. What culture dominates is a reflection of power and who holds power. Culture shift happens when we take personal and collective responsibility for the culture we nurture. At the heart of our many cultures and worldviews we find our values.

As a multicultural team that serves a multi-cultural and intergenerational community we find our values are an interconnected web between us. In a conversation with longtime community organizers, Anishinaabe elders, and advocates Ricky DeFoe and Skip Sandman in Duluth, we are asked “what is your culture if you don’t know your values? Organizations want to talk about culture without talking about values, there is no culture without values.” Our culture and values are interlinked.

At Voices for Racial Justice we value our elders, cultural workers, and experts who carry the wisdom that influence us in how we tend to the soil of our movements. We were blessed to have Ricky DeFoe join us at the beginning of our Duluth organizing training kick off, grounding our circle in an exchange of what values we know are sacred to us and that have been informed by the worldviews of our loving and wise ancestors.

What we value gets our attention, time and resources and what we do not value gets forgotten and eventually left behind, and what is devalued gets destroyed. At Voices for Racial Justice we are aware of how power shapes what gets valued and the culture of how things are done within institutions, from schools to government departments, from the curriculum taught to the policies passed. We are aware of how toxic worldviews create toxic cultures that lead to toxic practices and norms.

We recognize that solutions to injustices and disparities will not come from the very toxic cultures and systems that created them. Nor will mainstream models and approaches to working with communities of color and Indigenous communities that focus on deficit, what is lacking, where there is harm, and what needs “fixing” — as if the people themselves are broken. Although it is true that our communities are facing many forms of injustice and disparities we know programming that focuses on “assimilating” folks of color and Indigenous people devalues the cultures, medicines, resources, and strengths our communities already have. We draw on the strengths, culture, traditions, within our communities as sources of knowledge, creative inspiration, healing and power.

At Voices for Racial Justice we value, honor and respect the diverse worldviews, cultures, and values of people of color and Indigenous people which requires we take a proactive stance against pressures that assimilate, erase and devalue our traditions, ways of being, cultures, history, and languages. Cultural strategy and shared learning requires expansiveness to value other ways of being that are different from our own. We welcome cultural differences while leaning into sharing our collective values informing the culture of racial justice we create together.

“America makes policies but they’re not for us. Why shouldn’t we make policies that will allow us to work with our people in the Caribbean, in Central and South America, in Africa, in the Isles of the Pacific? We are an international people. Why don’t we begin to act like it?” — L. F. Muhammad

A Vision of Racial Justice Grounded in Culture and Community

Voices For Racial Justice is committed to a vision of racial justice that honors the cultures, knowledges, and systems of governance of black, brown, immigrant, and indigenous communities. We believe that we can never grow with or communicate with people to build a collective village un­less we begin to make time to hear our languages, share our foods, learn our cul­tures, and respect our identities and ways of being in the world. This is what we mean when we say that we are committed to developing research and policy tools that are grounded in culture and community. To support this vision, our policy tools will be developed in collaboration with people from our diverse communities.

Caring for the Soil of Racial Justice Organizing

Voices For Racial Justice is grateful to local artist and organizer, Ricardo Levins Morales, who played a profoundly supportive role in inspiring us to reframe our organizing and healing processes in ways that respect the fullness of humanity in deep relationship with our ever-changing and complex political, economic, social, and ecological environments. He says,

“The soil is more important than the seeds. Almost anything will grow in rich, nutritious soil, whereas it’s hard to get anything to grow if the soil is barren and toxic and won’t hold moisture. So the seeds are our projects, our initiatives, our campaigns, our organizations, our institutions, that we want to build and the soil is the compost of beliefs, ideas, values, narratives that create the environment within which we are working.”

Among our staff, there is debate as to whether the soil is more important than the seeds, whether the seeds are more important than the soil, or whether the soil and the seeds are equally important. The beauty is that we are seeing soil and seeds as part of culture shift work that has many parts. Ricardo’s quote is open to many interpretations and creates conversational spaces for those interpretations. In caring for the soil of racial justice organizing, we work to create spaces that honor multiple perspectives and interpretations. In doing this, we learn that it is not always about being right, but about being heard.

History and Impact of our Policy Tools over the Years

The landscape of racial equity policy making is changing in Minnesota. Today, there is some movement in government to embed racial equity in their practices and policies. Yet this wasn’t always the case. According to one of our founders, Sam Grant, “In the early 1990’s, we were struggling to begin to articulate a cross-cultural approach and culturally specific approaches to organizing. And I think part of the critique from our apprentices is that OAP [our former name Organizing Apprenticeship Project] itself wasn’t helping them navigate this difficulty.”

Grant went on to share his appreciation of OAP and how it had enough wisdom to slow down, bring in some help, and figure out a new way. As OAP looked for help in navigating the difficulty of being an organization led by people of color with an explicit commitment to racial justice organizing, they encountered the Applied Research Center (ARC), which had an explicit approach to racial justice. As a result of that relationship, OAP grew from a training center to an organization that would develop accountability strategies on racial justice through policy tools. One of the policy tools that emerged from this was the Legislative Report Card on Racial Equity. In the words of Voices for Racial Justice senior organizer, Julia Freeman, the racial equity report card “…actually held legislators accountable for the laws that they made that impacted communities of color both positively and negatively. It was very empowering…to have this moral document.”

One of the major impacts of the report card was the discursive space it created for racial equity conversations in organizing, in advocacy, in research, and in public policy. Our other policy tools which contribute to the conversation of racial equity policy making in Minnesota include the Racial Equity Legislative Agenda, the Racial Equity Impact Assessment, and the Legislative mid-session Bill Watch. Together, the goal of these tools is to help legislators make better policy decisions by helping them ask key questions pertinent to racial equity before adopting and implementing new policies. The effectiveness of our policy tools is measured by our practice of authentic community engagement. This ensures that the communities we are in relationships with feel that their voices are embedded in the policy process from the beginning.

New Directions in Policy

After 25 years of being in community, we thought it was important to hear from communities about the effectiveness of our policy tools. Over the past few months, our policy team has been working in collaboration with community partners to determine how we are going to engage with communities and legislators in this review of our policy tools. This is important because after over a decade of grading legislators, we found that while the number of racial equity champions (legislators who receive a grade of A or B in the Legislative Report Card on Racial Equity) had increased at the Legislature, racial equity in Minnesota had not. The deeper process of working in and with community to design policy tools that are rooted in our unique cultures is difficult to reflect here in this essay. Some of the questions we have grappled with in thinking about our new directions were formed during a year long process of collaborating with each other in internal visioning sessions. One question that continues to inspire us is how we came to the realization that we had to be more expansive about how we were thinking about policy and its relationship to racial justice.

One of the first things we decided to do was form a policy team. The idea informing this decision was that we wanted to share in the process of thinking what our new direction in policy would look like. We wanted to work collaboratively and we wanted to work in a way that was transformative. We did not want one person to feel as though he or she was responsible for coming up with all of our policy ideas alone. Rather, we wanted to work in a way that reflected the spirit of Our Mnisota, a place that imagines the beauty of a world where many worlds fit.

We also wanted to work in a way that was informed by popular education. We move in this work with the recognition that the answers and solutions are in our communities. Popular education is an approach that honors that. It is an approach where people engage each other as learners to critically reflect on the issues in their community and then take action to change them. We are attracted to popular education as a way to have deep conversations with community members because it is a practice that dismantles a top-down approach to knowledge and functions as an exchange among all participants.

With popular education as a way to have conversations, we invited artists, healers, community members, lobbyists, advocates, and organizers into small, intimate gatherings where we explored how to balance self-care with our work and ground a healing justice approach in policy. These gatherings are held the last Thursday of every month in the evenings from 4-6 p.m. The space is for people of color and indigenous (POCI) voices. We are creating space for voices and experiences that are not part of the culture at the Legislature and other policymaking spaces. In this way, we develop both the capacity to move into those spaces, while also creating a different vision, a different way of doing policy.

Our first gathering was held in March, 2018. Four months later, in July, we held our first public event, Our Mnisota: Growing our New Public DNA. This was based on an event held last year called Breathe and Heal after the 2017 legislative session. Both events were held as spaces for people of color who work in policy to come together and share stories of success and challenge. Healers from the People’s Movement Center and other local healers were invited to share healing practices with different groups throughout the evening.

We use the term “Mnisota” instead of the more popular term, Minnesota, to honor the original Dakota words, Mni Sota Makoce, a term that Dakota elder, Chris MatoNunpa, translates to “land where the waters reflect the clouds.” We believe that racial justice and the end of all racial disparities isn’t possible without first acknowledging the history of the land that we occupy, land which was stolen from Dakota people, people who lived here since time immemorial and were killed or forcibly expelled in order for us to live here today. As we continue to center healing justice in all of our work, gatherings such as Breathe and Heal and Growing Our New Public DNA are reflections of this new approach.

Growing Our New Public DNA was a title that was given to us by local organizer, MK Nguyen. Over fifty people gathered at the East Side Freedom Library to share in an evening of food, conversation, and healing. In a fishbowl style of conversation, we discussed ideas from Resmaa Menakem’s book, My Grandmother’s Hands, such as “clean pain” and “dirty pain,” and the work we have to do in our own POCI communities to address these types of pain. In the question that was asked during the discussion, dirty pain was described as the violence that travels across our bodies when we don’t give ourselves the time, place, and space to heal. Clean pain was described as the work needed to be done to clear up the clutter in our bodies, such as ego, vanity, and greed, that keeps us from being able to achieve Our Mnisota, a place where the waters truly reflect the skies. People were vulnerable. Mistakes were made. Things were said that should not have been said, but apologies were made, and as a result, we worked through difficult situations together and people said that they were free to be their whole selves. The event was magical! It gave us a glimpse of what an event designed in and with community looks, tastes, smells, sounds, and feels like.

Assessment of Policy Tools

In order to ensure that our policy tools are relevant and useful in new and innovative ways, we have begun a series of assessments. The first assessment went to all 201 state legislators at the end of the 2018 legislative session. It consisted of eight open-ended questions in which legislators were asked to write-in their responses. Hard copies of the questionnaire were delivered to state representatives in the House and to state senators in the Senate. Digital copies were also provided via email. Additionally, telephone calls were made to all legislators. Following the phone calls, digital copies of the questionnaire were mailed out at least two more times, once before the end of session, and once after session ended. In total, we received less than ten responses.

We also created an assessment for our community partners. The purpose of this assessment was to learn how our policy tools can support our partners’ understanding and leadership for racial equity in Mnisota. We are interested in creating policy tools that are culturally rooted in our communities and that are helpful in tangible ways for organizers, advocates, and lobbyists who are leading for racial justice. We will be spending the fall months deepening our understanding of our assessments through one to one conversations and small group conversations. Our goal is to begin the 2019 legislative session with a plan that is informed by our legislative and community assessments.

Research Justice

The elders said, “We get scared when people bring us thick reports that are bound together and have tabs on them…Educated people are impressed by those thick reports. So their symbols must be that. You know, they must really like to write these thick reports. Some of us say that they write their reports in too small letters because we can’t read them, and we get a headache by the time we get a little ways into it.” — Community Based Research Focus Group Participant, Seattle

Voices for Racial Justice (VRJ) is committed to research that honors the multiple histories, truths, and wisdom of black, brown, immigrant and indigenous communities. Given our principles of authentic community engagement, we utilize Research Justice, a framework that centers the expertise of communities of color and indigenous communities in the process of designing, gathering, and sharing stories. Research justice is based on the assumptions that the greatest impact in achieving justice is done with people who are directly affected by injustice and that our experiences must inform each phase of the research, analysis, storytelling, planning, and implementation processes.

Community-Based Participatory Action Research (CBPAR)

As a framework, research justice lends itself to a practice in which community members are equal partners in all stages of the research process. This practice is known as community-based participatory action research (CBPAR). At VRJ, our research projects, questions, focus, and analysis are informed by CBPAR.

Through dialogue with our partners, CBPAR strives to build research strategies that challenge systems, institutions, funders, and policy leaders to invest in community-based research practices that build capacity with communities of color and indigenous communities to develop solutions that serve our interests and recognize our expertise. This practice resists oppression and systemic and institutional violence by creating knowledge WITH communities rather than FOR communities. Our practice of CBPAR redefines research as a collaborative process rather than as something only produced by “experts” from academia. CBPAR envisions research as a process of knowledge creation where communities’ experiences and wisdom are central pieces of the entire research process.

Consequently, we value evidence that is reflective of multiple forms of knowledge, including experiential, spiritual, cultural, place-based, theoretical, quantitative, qualitative, interpretive, and evaluative. We also believe in a wide range of approaches to facilitating knowledge exchange, including storytelling, oral histories, interactive activities, music, poetry, visual art, community visioning, and deep relationship building. CBPAR enables us to build relationships and trust with communities in ways that cause us to constantly reflect on our own attitudes and behaviors. Sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we do not. Yet, this is a process that requires a deep structure of accountability so that we can learn from our partners and our mistakes.

Two of our recent CBPAR reports are the JDAI Report and the Unfit for Human Consumption Report. Both reports give concrete examples of our research values, some of the mistakes we made, lessons learned, and the powerful stories of our research teams. Both reports share the necessity of a healing justice lens in CBPAR and provide examples of the impact of hearing stories from people deeply affected by incarceration.

Our Research Values, Assumptions, and Principles

We are committed to the following values, assumptions and principles to guide our research:

Awareness, acceptance, and valuing of cultural differences.

Awareness of the range of dynamics that result from the interaction between people of different cultures.

Developing cultural knowledge of a particular community in collaboration with that community.

Ability to adapt research practices to fit the cultural context of the individual, family, or community.

There is no “one size fits all” way of doing research.

Respect for deeply held values, general worldviews, patterns of communication and interactions.

Sharing food is a way of being in deep relationship with others.

Traditional spirituality and practices are integrated into research practices.

We learn to adapt tone of voice, volume, and speech patterns to that of the highest expression of respect and grace.

We observe others and allow them to create the space and initiate or ask for any physical contact.

Looking into the Future

Voices for Racial Justice is on a journey to build creative approaches to grassroots policy and research that tend to the soil of our movements and that honor the culture and healing of our communities. In this effort, we are constantly asking what does grassroots policy and research look like that is life-giving, that shifts culture, that is rooted in beauty and real governance, and that bridges the divides within our communities? To answer these questions, we continue to hold spaces for communities of color and indigenous communities to share our stories and experiences. We believe that through sharing our stories we will move through our commitment to center trust-building across cultural groups in our movements.

Looking into the future, some of the transformative grassroots policy and research ideas that we are dreaming of include:

Community based participatory action research (CBPAR) that continues our efforts to end mass incarceration.

CBPAR that evaluates the implementation of legislative policies from previous years, such as Ban the Box and the Urban Agriculture Bill.

CBPAR that focuses on the development of cooperative economic development practices and cultural centers for black, brown, immigrant, and indigenous communities.

Using local civic engagement technology to deepen collaborations among partners on policy projects.

Working collaboratively with community partners, including youth and legislators, to ensure that all legislation passed undergoes a racial equity impact analysis.

Working collaboratively with community partners, including youth and legislators, to write legislation that reflects our commitments to racial justice.

Holding conversations about historical forms of governance in POCI communities.

Constant engagement and reflection with our partners to ensure that our policy and research tools are rooted in culture and healing.

I was very young when I started fearing my body and the pain it could hold. Often I would be at school, my parents would get the call that I’d fainted again, and have to take me to the hospital. A few months ago, I was curled up in fetal position in my bed, my head inclined at the exact angle to prevent a fainting spell, when I got a message from an aunt in Mexico. I had just shared a Facebook post about the frustrating reality of living with chronic pain that breaks you at every level. She had seen it, and asked me what was going on. I told her. It was the same story as always. I didn’t have to say much for her to understand. She suggested some herbal teas for the pain and reminded me to tend to my altar.

I was raised by circles of women committed to raising babies that are strong. Among them were my mother and my tías, resilient women who created sacred spaces where they could make their pain visible to each other, usually over a plate of food and often surrounded by the screams and laughter of their children. They would come together regularly when faced with heartbreak, domestic violence, crippling depression, but also at celebrations, rites of passage, birthdays.

Here I am on the right, at a blessing of the children in the procession to honor La Guadalupana in my hometown of Xico, Veracruz, 1994.

These circles raised us–their little girls–to honor ritual, the land, our bodies, the cycles of joy and grief.When my family left México, it felt like my roots were ripped from my feet. The loss of the land, of these spaces, these mujeres that had taught me so much about coming closer to myself, their children who were also my family, broke something inside of me. As more years pass, and now that I have lived in this country twice as long as I ever did in México, I’ve found myself building community in a way that honors the teachings of these women. As we hear more and more conversations emerging in different spaces and in our movements around healing, I know from experience that each of us have different stories and traditions that connect us to our innate ability to heal and be whole.

II.

So where do we begin?

What is really at stake?

What are we actually healing from?

It makes me think of that common saying: you have to know where you’ve been, to know where you’re going. For folks of color, immigrant populations and indigenous people living in this country and doing movement work, the histories and the legacies of violence we carry in our lines are not in isolation with the world we have inherited, and the world we are trying to build. This is deeply personal work. We are bringing our abuelitas, our nieces and nephews and visions of our descendents into the room.

I think of my own story of coming from survivors, women who have endured unimaginable violence, of a grandmother who made the choice to escape with her babies from a violence that could kill, in a land where she didn’t speak the language, and then had to work long days at a sweatshop to put food on the table. Though she left to join the ancestors earlier this year, she is with me every day. My grandmother, my mother, my cousins, they are why I fight and why I understand that my fight is wrapped up in my and our healing.

A mentor once told me, that if we are not diligent about doing our personal work of addressing our traumas, it will come out in our organizing. To be able to see what we are healing from, we have to unravel the ways our histories have been impacted by colonization, slavery, genocide,forced displacement. We also need to realize we bring those histories into a room when we organize and build with community. Healing within a backdrop of white supremacy means contending with its legacy of trauma and the different iterations it has and continues to hold through things like police violence, incarceration, deportation. We experience trauma within violently racialized systems born of historical oppression.

Honest conversations of what we are healing means bearing witness to all that was taken from us. It means contending with the trauma we have inherited in our DNA, but also forcing ourselves to recognize all that the violence was not able to kill. In a recent conversation with a community healer I was reminded that healing is not about pacifying or even necessarily diffusing conflict, it’s about breaking open and building the capacity to be able to confront that which is difficult, that which is painful. As an organization we’ve had to think deeply of what it means to be people with our trauma working with people with their own trauma. There are countless examples in movement work where people’s trauma shows up and replicates a model of violence against each other, similar to the violence created by whiteness towards people of color, but this time it’s within our own communities. These are the realities that have necessitated a healing justice framework at Voices. Through the process of recognizing that we do in fact inherit profound histories of trauma, we recognize we also inherit the strength and resilience to sustain and transform ourselves.

Our journey to Healing Justice at Voices has taken some time. When I joined the team four years ago, conversations had already begun around how we should be addressing trauma in our communities as part of the work. Alumni from our organizing training were expressing the need for spaces that held truthful and grounding conversations on how to be whole in movement work. Then, one year later in the first week of our first Youth Cultural Organizing Institute, our powerful cohort challenged us on what our stance on healing was. “You guys need to do better than what’s happening in the organizing community,” they told me. “You have to model something different.” It was a reminder that youth are used to being taken advantage of by organizations and movements, and that there needs to be a plan for supporting youth through their organizing journeys. We honor the powerful voices of the youth who pushed us to walk the talk. As a result of that first week with our first youth cohort, we began to dig deeper into conversations of trauma and healing at Voices.

Our first Youth Cultural Organizing Institute cohort, July 2015

Recently I was listening to Kate Werning’s Healing Justice podcast featuring Francisca Porchas Coronado, an Arizona based anti-racist organizer and healer. In their conversation, Francisca articulated a tension that shows up all the time in movement spaces when trying to pair organizing with healing justice:

How is healing really challenging the culture in organizations and for people on the ground? There is a bridging that needs to happen to really integrate individual and collective transformation into the work of political and popular education, the work of organizing door to door, the work of campaign planning. Is this a tactic that we’re using?

This resonates with questions that as a team we’ve been grappling with:

How can we authentically integrate healing justice in how we do this work and how we relate to each other and our communities in the process?

What is our commitment to our individual healing journeys so that when we do show up to do that work collectively we are engaging in our best way?

As we work towards innovative approaches to engaging healing justice in life-giving ways in our movements, it’s important to remember that not only can it be done, but it has been done before. We have rich examples to draw from, not only from the present, but also from our cultural histories and ancestral knowledge.

III.

Over the last year, through our strategic planning process to ground our mission and vision in nurturing the soil for racial justice organizing, healers from the People’s Movement Center have helped to guide us on what healing justice can look like at Voices. Through this, we have realized there is profound knowledge we can share and learn from each other that will help us in this time of transition and deepening of our work. We are learning as we go about what this will look like in the long run. We don’t have all the answers, but are committed to engaging in a healing justice framework that transforms.

Healing in its simplest sense is to become whole again after trauma. Susan Raffo and Ayo Clemons, local healing practitioners with the People’s Movement Center who have supported us in our own healing process at Voices, have described healing as supporting your body, heart and spirit. Resmaa Menakem framed trauma for us as “too much, too soon, too fast.” Healing Justice takes into account individual trauma we have lived and historical trauma we’ve inherited created by systems of oppression, to then build community strategies of resilience and transformation.

So what does that look like at Voices right now?

Buddy system:Each staff is paired off and meet weekly over the course of 2-3 months to check in around their wellness and the things they are wrestling with that is impacting them personally and in their work.

Wellness check-ins: Every meeting, gathering, and training starts with an opening circle where people share how they’re doing and what if anything is impacting the way they are in the space.

Wellness program: Staff receive 2 hours/week of wellness time during the work day that can include but is not limited to walking or other forms of exercise, meditation, therapy; wellness dollars for each staff member include $50/month for gym or other health membership and $250/6 months for wellness related services or trainings. Unused dollars are used for collective wellness activities.

Meditation practice with our weekly staff meetings.

Ongoing work with community healers: We are in deep relationship with the People’s Movement Center and other community healers to continue to define and guide the ways we frame healing individually and collectively as we move through our work.

Every gathering, event, and strategy has healing at its core. As an example, last year we held an event titled, “Breathe and Heal,” which was a gathering of organizers and advocates working for racial justice coming together for conversation and healing. In addition to holding a space where organizers and community members could have deep conversation about the impact of the session, we invited healing practitioners into the space to offer their care. As we were envisioning what this space should hold we were guided by the following questions: How do we reduce harm to our communities from the government while having enough time for joy and building with our people? How do we heal from the legislative session and remain resilient and healthy in the face of a political climate which is violent to indigenous communities and communities of color?

Integrating Healing Justice across our trainings: We frame historical trauma as a way to understand systems of oppression and the need for healing, as well as share embodiment practices to ground participants.

Our team at Voices for Racial Justice.

IV.

The breadth of possibility of what we can build together when we ground healing in our lives and organizing is transformative. As a team over the last year, we had the chance to read adrienne maree brown’s “Emergent Strategy.” This book helped us find words for a more holistic approach to understanding the ways of trauma in movement but also our capacity to create new approaches that treat us individually and collectively as whole. One of the affirmations, prayers, that I hold close and go back to often from her book is the following:

I am living a life I don’t regret

A life that will resonate with my ancestors,

and with as many generations forward as I can

imagine.

I am attending to the crises of my time with

my best self,

I am of communities that are doing our

collective best

to honor our ancestors and all humans to

come.

Our next steps are to continue to move forward in this collective work of healing in racial justice organizing. This means moving past a healing justice that solely talks about self care, and honoring models of organizing that are healing rather than violent and depleting. We will continue to ask questions, to listen, to build with our communities to make visible that which we have inherited in order to transform our pain into something new, something whole, something resilient. We don’t have all the answers, nor do we claim to, but recognize that work informed by trauma and rooted in healing can no longer be treated as a luxury. Our lives and our movements depend on it.